Cheezburger’s Ben Huh Wants to Break the News So He Can Fix It

Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh said he wants to “suck the life out of” the newspaper model that says many publications should have their own version of the same story.Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

AUSTIN, Texas — Ben Huh is already over the viral video “Kony 2012.” But it’s not because as the CEO of the Cheezburger Network he’s already moved on to the next meme. It’s that for him the video, while socially relevant, has taken a groundswell of internet attention and pointed it at a single issue, while scores of others go unnoticed.

Huh would rather the internet’s attention — its “one-click altruism,” as he calls it — be turned to things like displacement in Africa or other large issues instead of “something you can easily hate.” The video about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has been viewed nearly 73 million times in a week, but there are other issues that deserve those millions of eyeballs.

It may surprise some people that the guy who is mainly known for popularizing fat cats with misspelled photo captions has so much to say about the news. But Huh, who got his bachelor’s in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill school in 1999, is at SXSW to work on his latest venture, a news service called Circa. Huh dreamed up Circa with SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan, and they are looking to change the way people consume news on mobile devices.

That may sound trite, but for Huh, the business of news is broken (forgive the pun). What he wants to build isn’t just a sleek new design for a news aggregator: He wants to make a product — likely an app — that would let people “follow a story, not a topic” and create a system where there’s one version of every big breaking news story, and everything else is additional context.

“Why do I need 1,800 versions of ‘Michael Jackson died today’?” asked Huh, who is on Circa’s board, while Galligan is serving as CEO. “I literally want to suck the life out of that market. It’s the disruptive way of doing business.”

To that end, Galligan has been working hard to get Circa rolling, raising $750,000 from a small handful of investors and bringing on a chief technology officer, some developers and a designer. While both Huh and Galligan are long on big ideas, both are pretty tight-lipped about what Circa will become and what its business model will look like, mainly because it’s still under development.

“We don’t talk about it a lot, because it’s easy to jump to conclusions about what we may be.”

“I’m not an aggregator, I’m not a content company, I’m not a media company,” Galligan told Wired. “Circa is a technology company that uses news as the medium to produce something where we can inform the world, [but] this is why we don’t talk about it a lot, because it’s easy to jump to conclusions about what we may be.”

What they will say is that Circa will create at least some of its own content and be available by the end of the year. Huh also hints that the sensors and location services on mobile devices make the possibilities with news apps “a whole different ballgame.”

It’s been a particularly tough nut to crack for other news organizations. Print media, online and off, has slowly been finding its way into the app world, but it’s usually through aggregator apps like Flipboard, Pulse or Instapaper. A few dedicated apps from news outlets like The New York Times exist, but save for perhaps News Corp.’s The Daily, most repurpose content made for other mediums.

Only recently have they gotten traction. Noticing an uptick in overall online traffic (newspaper websites averaged more than 111 million monthly unique visitors in the fourth quarter of 2011), the Newspaper Association of America credited creative apps with building those audiences.

With a product still very much in the works, it’s almost impossible to tell if what Circa is doing will best any of the efforts already out there. But Galligan has a knack for launching successful startups (he already has two under his belt). And if Huh — the full-time CEO of Cheezburger Network, who is giving up advising other startups to focus on Circa — has proven one thing over the years, it’s that he has a near-prescient sense for what people will find engrossing (try to look away from LoLcats, just try).

“We’re seeing the rise of partisan journalism, and I want to give people what they want, I don’t want to tell them what they need,” Huh said. “And I think that’s a good, sound business model.”